At which point a large percentage of us screamed and ran the other way, because surveys show that one fifth of men and a third of women are frightened of arachnids.

It makes sense, right? Spiders can be poisonous.

But so are stinging insects such as bees and wasps, and yet we seem to hate spiders more. At the University of Wurzburg, Germany, psychologist Georg Alpers asked 76 students to rate photos of spiders, wasps, bees, beetles, butterflies and moths on how much fear and disgust they inspired and how dangerous they were. Spiders topped the list in all three categories—even though all bees can sting, but only some spiders are poisonous.

So are we born with a fear of spiders, or is it something we learn, something that perhaps, as Stuart Hine, an entomologist at London’s Natural History Museum, told New Scientist magazine “stems back to the days of plagues when people suspected anything that crawled out of the thatch as carrying disease.”

Certainly we seem to be born with the ability to recognize spiders over other objects. Recently New Scientist reported on the research of David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who showed five-month-old babies simple representations of spiders, made up of block-like shapes, plus other, more jumbled, images made of the same shapes.

He found that the babies looked at the “spiders” for an average of 24 seconds, but at the jumbled images for only around 16 seconds—a full eight seconds less. That suggests babies are born with a “mental template” for spider shapes, and possibly for other things that could harm us (snakes comes to mind).

For safe objects, however, no such template seems to exist. Rakison repeated his experiment with a representation of a flower. The babies didn’t spend any more time looking at that than they did looking at the images made with jumbled shapes.

Now New Scientist has reported on a new study by Rakison, one that suggests not only that fear of spiders is something that is learned sometime after birth, but also suggests women learn that fear more readily than men—which explains why more women than men fear spiders.

This time Rakison worked with 11-month-olds. In the training phase of the test he showed 10 girls and 10 boys a picture of a spider alongside a fearful face. In the following phase he showed them the image of a spider alongside a happy face, and then the image of a flower paired with a fearful face.

He found that even when the spider was paired with a happy face, the girls looked at it significantly longer than at the flower, which he interpreted as meaning that after the initial phase, the girls had already learned to link spiders with fear. The boys, on the other hand, spent the same amount of time looking at both images: they hadn’t made that assumption.

With a different group of babies, Rakison skipped the training phase featuring the spider with the fearful face, and simply showed them a spider with a happy face and a flower with a fearful face. This time both boys and girls looked at the images for the same length of time.

That implies both that babies don’t have an inborn fear of spiders and that girls are more prone than boys to develop that fear.

Rakison thinks girls may be more inclined than boys to learn to fear all kinds of dangerous animals, a gender difference which may have evolved during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer phase, when to be successful at hunting men had to be more willing to take risks, whereas women had to be good at avoiding dangerous animals, including spiders.

Acquiring, rather than being born with, a fear of spiders also makes sense, Rakison says, since there’s no point in an infant fearing spiders until it can respond to them in some way, by crawling away, for instance.

More mature responses include screaming, running, climbing on chairs or smashing the nasty little eight-legged monstrosity into paste with repeated blows of a…

Sorry. Got a little carried away.

Spiders. Yecch.

Cloned, genetically altered goats producing spider silk in their milk sounds like something out of The X-Files, but it was in all the papers last week when a company called Nexia revealed it had cloned three goats (Clint, Danny and Arnold), and explained why.

The cloning of goats brings to four (sheep, mice, cows and goats) the number of species that have been cloned since Dolly the sheep made headlines a couple of years ago, using a process called nuclear transfer.

A clone is an exact genetic copy of an existing animal. Every cell in an animal’s body contains the complete genetic information for the entire animal within its nucleus. In nuclear transfer cloning, cells are taken from the animal to be cloned, then the DNA is removed from the nuclei. The DNA is transferred into mature, unfertilized eggs, which begin developing, just as if they’d been fertilized. The embryos are then transferred into surrogate mothers.

Each of the Montreal goats is essentially an identical twin of the original goat. They all have the same markings and the same head and body shapes.

Nexia didn’t clone Clint, Danny and Arnold because of a shortage of goats. Nexia wants to create an entirely different breed of goats: goats that have been genetically altered to produce a substance similar to spider silk in their milk.

If you’ve just decided to swear off goat cheese, relax: the milk wouldn’t be for human consumption. The goal is to retrieve the spider-silk proteins from the milk and turn them into a substance called BioSteel, an incredibly light fabric both biodegradable and strong enough to stop bullets. Nexia thinks BioSteel could be used in everything from body armor to spacecraft construction. It could replace plastics and other materials the body typically rejects for artificial tendons, ligaments and other prostheses. It could make super-thin, biodegradable sutures for eye or brain surgery. It could even strengthen the structural steel used in buildings. (Although it would have to be carefully sealed from the environment so bacteria wouldn’t eat it.)

Spider silk is made of a protein whose molecules are capable of making lots of bonds with neighboring molecules. As spiders secrete this protein, it hardens and pulls taut, crystallizing into a strong cable able to withstand the impact of a hurtling fly.

There’s a strong similarity between the way mammals make milk proteins and spiders make silk proteins. Nexia believes they can introduce the gene from spiders that causes certain cells to produce silk into goats, tricking the goats’ mammary glands into producing silk along with milk. The goats would become biological factories.

Once Nexia has goats containing the spider-silk gene, it will clone them, then breed them normally to produce a herd of goats, all of which contain the spider-silk gene.

Nexia at first indicated they had been the first to clone goats, but it turns out three goats were cloned in the U.S. last fall, for a similar reason: they’ve been genetically modified to produce an anti-blood clotting protein, called Antithrombin III, in their milk. Antithrombin III is currently undergoing human tests.

These advances have many people concerned. Every advance in cloning makes it more likely that someone will try to clone a human, which critics feel threatens the integrity of being human. “Every human has a right to have their life as a surprise. We have a right not to be manufactured,” is how Dr. Margaret Somerville, an ethicist at McGill University, puts it.

Others see a nightmare world in which clones are created simply to provide body parts. Since the clones would be genetically identical, organs from them would not be rejected by the original’s body.

Many people are pushing for laws banning human cloning, and the federal government announced the day after the Montreal scientists announced the birth of Danny, Clint and Arnold that it will soon introduce such legislation.

The cloning of animals isn’t as big an ethical concern in most people’s minds, since we already use animals to provide food and clothing. But there are concerns about the cross-species exchange of genes. Critics point out that living systems are so much more complicated than we appreciate that we can’t know what consequences cross-species engineering will have.

But the beneficial possibilities of herds of dairy animals able to produce drugs and other valuable substances along with their milk are so great it’s such research will slow. Just like the old science fiction movies they evoke, the Spider-Goat Clones of Montreal will almost certainly spawn sequels.